The secret folly of we human beings isn’t that we struggle to have a say in our experience of life, but rather that — in spite of all evidence to the contrary — we cling to the idea that we understand the true nature of experience.

There is a hidden part of you that knows, without thinking about it, how to always be perfectly relaxed, carefree, and in command. This higher intellectual and emotional intelligence is to your present thoughts and feelings as is the mighty oak to its own spreading branches. Once you come into contact with its perfect strength and power, you'll wonder how you ever lived without it. Great mas...

Featured Study Group Topic for the Week of August 24, 2015. In the end... there is one, and only one thing that can be given (up) by us... and that is the false sense of self born of having become identified with something. The amazing thing is... that since whatever one is identified with doesn't exist without one having first imagined it... this means one's sense of self -- created by one's...

In one respect, everything about one's spiritual life is so terribly simple. There is only one time and one way in which to be still, and that is to be still. So the first thing is to understand that we don't need to stop the world. What we need to do is understand that the world whirling around us is the world of our own reactions. It isn't until we can start to see some of this that it be...

Beauty is not found in its infinite and ineffable "details" -- but in its deft ability to still the mind and fill the heart with quiet gratitude.

Most of us hold the unquestioned belief that our hearts and minds are at peace before one of life's "waves" washes in to disturb us. But if we take away the prejudice of self-pleasing images -- and add the ease with which we are disturbed by unwanted moments -- we have good cause to suspect something entirely different about ourselves. Could a truer view of what takes place in such times of...

Could the light of timeless truths, spoken by masters over thousands of years -- the hope and promise they hold about our own latent higher possibilities -- help liberate us from the host of fears that hold our consciousness hostage? Imagine the end of all forms of fanaticism born of imagined differences, the beginning of a new order of peace created from the collective understanding that *al...

Before you can hope to know the peace of being in God's company, you must first learn to be at peace in the company of yourself.

Uncertainty is unwanted because it feels so unpleasant each time it appears in our lives. But, can we be awake enough to see its positively bright side? For as surely as darkness must come before the break of a new day, so it's true: before the new light of higher understanding can have its gentle dawn in us -- we must see that we have come to the end of what we know.

Isn't it true that the moment we are disturbed by an event, there is a reaction that takes place within us? That reaction forms as a stimulus we then respond to by trying to figure out how to resolve this pain we're in, fix the person, or change the condition so that the disturbance we're feeling will go away. This means that we are meeting the disturbance with further disturbance, but we don't see that the disturbed is an effect of the disturbance.

Real compassion has to do with realizing that conscious relationship is the root of our existence, trying to get us to wake up a little bit and enter into those relationships which make it possible for our lives to become what they're intended to be.

The whole idea of wanting 'more' cannot be separated from the idea that one doesn't have 'enough.' Seen properly -- unmistakably evident in this revelation -- is that one's lifelong pursuit of 'more' is, in fact, spent in the service of an incomplete, constantly needy nature that, at best, can only be momentarily satisfied.